


as you were designed

by extasiswings



Category: 9-1-1 (TV)
Genre: Angst, Family Dynamics, Gen, Healing, Insecurities, Introspection, Recovery, Soft Eddie Diaz, Therapy, complicated family relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-22
Updated: 2020-07-22
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:34:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25435465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/extasiswings/pseuds/extasiswings
Summary: For the Prompt:“Do not look for healing at the feet of those who broke you.”“Tell me about your parents,” Frank says when they’re six months into having sessions once every two weeks.Eddie’s stomach twists uncomfortably.  He forces a laugh.  “Here I thought we were doing so well, Frank.”
Relationships: implied Evan "Buck" Buckley/Eddie Diaz
Comments: 17
Kudos: 188





	as you were designed

**Author's Note:**

  * For [elisela](https://archiveofourown.org/users/elisela/gifts).



“Tell me about your parents,” Frank says when they’re six months into having sessions once every two weeks. 

Eddie blinks and looks up from his hands.

“My parents?” He repeats.

Frank shrugs as if he’s just making conversation and doesn’t have any particular investment in whether Eddie responds or not.

“We’ve talked about Christopher, Buck, the 118, your sisters, your other family, Shannon—but you don’t talk about your parents,” he replies. “So…tell me about them.”

Eddie’s stomach twists uncomfortably. He forces a laugh. “Here I thought we were doing so well, Frank.”

“You don’t have to,” Frank acknowledges. “This is your time—we can talk about whatever, or nothing at all, you know that. It’s just a suggestion.”

The therapist’s voice is calm, soothing—not for the first time, Eddie wonders if Frank practices that voice or if it’s just the way he always talks. His own head swirls. What is there to say about his parents? That his mother nitpicked and micromanaged him and his sisters so much when they were growing up that now as adults all of them live several hundred miles away from her at least? That their support has always come with strings attached? That they’ve never trusted him with his own son? That—

“When I came home after I joined the army, my father told me he was proud of me.” 

It slips out, a thought that Eddie hadn’t even realized was in the mix with all the rest. It’s not strange, perhaps—the other piece of the thread is that in over thirty years of life, he can count on one hand the number of times his father has said that to him. 

Frank hums and scratches something down on his notepad. “How did that make you feel?”

Eddie swallows as the memory tugs at him, drags him back to twenty years old and terrified, with a pregnant wife and no other plans. He recalls the way his father had just looked at him for a long moment and then nodded.

_”I’m proud of you. You stepped up. It’s the right thing to do.”_

Eddie swallows. His palms are sweaty. He wipes them on his pants. 

“I don’t know,” he replies. “I think maybe at the time I liked it? Like it was confirmation that I’d done what I needed to. But later—”

He trails off, pulled into another memory. The fight before he and Christopher left for LA. _Don’t drag him down with you._

“Take your time,” Frank says.

“My dad wasn’t around a lot when I was a kid,” Eddie admits. “He worked a lot and traveled a lot _for_ work. He said that part of being a man was about providing for your family—ripped into me pretty good about that when Shannon first got pregnant, saying we were too young, that I should have been more careful, asking how I expected to take care of a family without a degree or a solid job. But then, when I was back, after Shannon left…he acted like it was a bad thing. That I was gone for those years. I did exactly what he did, did exactly what he told me to do, what he told me he was _proud of me_ for doing—and just a few years later, he turned around and used that to say I wasn’t fit to parent my son.”

“Have the two of you ever talked about that?”

Eddie snorts, bitterness rising up the back of his throat like bile. He doesn’t have the words to explain that the fissures in his relationship with both of his parents run deep and split wide, a lifetime of hypocrisy, of criticism, of him not being able to ask for help without knowing it would be held against him later leaving jagged chasms between them. 

“We fought about it at the time, but he just said that he had changed his mind about what was right as he got older or something like that. And when I left El Paso and took Christopher with me after they said they thought I shouldn’t, we didn’t talk for…god, nine months? Something like that? And when we finally did again, it was like nothing had ever happened. That’s how we deal with conflict in my family—by pretending it didn’t happen and never bringing it up again. Keep the peace, don’t rock the boat, sure as hell don’t admit you’re wrong or apologize.”

“What I’m hearing is there’s a lot of unresolved tension there.”

Eddie gives Frank a look, the one he only pulls out on occasions when the other man says something particularly obvious. He understands active listening and reflecting his thoughts back to him, but honestly. 

“My sisters and I have a monthly phone call that usually involves several minutes of all of us talking about what mom asked each of us about the others since the last time because she won’t just ask what’s going on in our lives directly. And the reason she won’t ask is because she thinks we won’t tell her. Given that the last several times I’ve told her anything about my life she’s used it as an excuse to bring up why I should move back to Texas, I can’t imagine why that is.”

Frank looks at Eddie over the top of his glasses. Okay, so maybe he’s been getting a little sarcastic, sue him. “I take your point,” Frank replies. “Is that something you want to fix? Your relationship with them?”

And that’s—a bit of a curveball. Because it isn’t _you should fix it_ or _here’s how you can make this better_ , it’s just _do you want to fix it_. As if not fixing it is an option. As if he’s allowed to be content with the status quo and doesn’t have to walk down the path of _they love you and just want what’s best for you so you should let everything else go_.

There’s a string of text messages on his phone from his father. Random things, conversation starters, songs he’s been listening to, news articles he wondered if Eddie had seen. Eddie hasn’t responded to any of them. They’re white flags, olive branches, but Eddie knows accepting them comes at a cost—the cost of himself, of his own hurt, shame, bitterness. He knows he’s never going to get an apology, never going to hear the words _I was wrong_.

Maybe some people would say _if you know that, then why not just let it go_ but…it’s not that simple.

“I don’t know,” Eddie says finally. “I don’t—it’s—I don’t know.”

“Why? What’s the sticking point for you?”

“Because—” Eddie blows out a breath and gestures absently. The words shatter on his tongue like glass, shards sticking in his throat so his only options are to swallow them or force them out, either of which will make him bleed. 

Six months ago, he would have swallowed them. Now, they come out—quiet, but an admission nonetheless.

“Because I wasn’t good enough. As a son, as a man, as a father, and they—they never let me forget that. In their eyes I was always doing something wrong, I’m _still_ always doing something wrong. I’m not good enough. After everything, I—”

Eddie rubs his hands over his face. “I left the army, I came here, I found a job I love, a _man_ I love—I built a life, I found a community, Christopher has stability, he has a good school, he has friends, he’s healthy and happy and _I_ am happy and yet I still worry every damn day that it’s not enough, that I’m screwing him up somehow, that I’m failing.”

“You’re a good father, Eddie.”

“I _know_ that!” That’s the problem. That he knows, logically, that he is miles better at being a parent than his own ever were. So why can’t he stop hearing _don’t drag him down with you_ every time any minor inconvenience happens?

“I know that,” he repeats more subdued. “I—but that’s why I don’t know if I want to fix things. Or if I can. There’s so much—there’s too much.”

Frank checks his watch.

“You know, we’re almost out of time, but for what it’s worth, Eddie—six months ago, you wouldn’t have been able to say what you just did. You couldn’t tell me that you were happy or that you thought Christopher was happy or that you knew you were a good father. You’ve grown a lot. We can pick this up next time if you’d like, but—all the hurt, all the resentment, all the tension, your feelings are valid. You don’t have to forgive your parents for the ways they’ve hurt you. You aren’t obligated to just because they’re family. You’re allowed to feel how you feel. But if you decide you would like to let go—not for them, but for yourself—I’ll help you do that.”

Eddie exhales shakily and it feels like his shoulders loosen, like his breath comes a little easier, like someone’s removed a block of cement that was sitting on his chest. 

“Thank you, Frank.”

The other man smiles faintly. “Same time in two weeks?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll see you then.”


End file.
